A need exists for inexpensive, facile, abundant, renewable, and/or biodegradable alternatives to silicon. Silicon is facing increasing supply constraints due to the parallel growth of the microdevice and solar energy industries. In addition, silicon processing is generally regarded as expensive and environmentally detrimental, due to the fact that it requires energy intensive processing with harsh chemicals. These and other drawbacks make many potential “lab on a chip” applications (i.e., one time use or point of care devices) based on silicon technology cost prohibitive. To address some of the concerns with silicon processing, researchers have turned to polymeric substrates for micromachining. However, plastics that are amenable to micromachining tend to have challenging surface chemistries and/or other potential shortcomings.